Garmin-Asus Eyes Smartphone Market in India
Garmin-Asus, the only company that focuses on the integration of Location Based Services (LBS) technology in smart phones aims to capture an impressive 20% share of the Indian smart phone market. With the high number of sales enquiries generated for the recently launched Garmin-Asus M10, ASUS is confident that Indian consumers are gradually making the transition from buying just lifestyle phones to buying phones that are an ideal choice to maintain balance in the hectic Indian work-life scenario. Efforts are also being undertaken to fortify the relationship with Channel Partners through channel meets and tie-up with global Telecommunication giants like T-Mobile to ensure heightened consumer awareness about the latest products and to enable ASUS to present an ever increasing range of smartphones based on exclusive LBS technology.
Country Head for Handheld Business Group, ASUS (India) - Mr. John Chen expressed his thoughts on the potential of Indian smartphone market saying, “The tremendous response to the first smart3 phone- the Garmin-Asus M10 clearly indicates that consumers today are looking for the right smartphones that are packed with navigation, connectivity and lifestyle features. The Indian mobile phone consumer market has thus evolved and ASUS plans to cash in on the need for advanced smartphones that work using GPS and navigation facilities. There are plans on the anvil to launch devices on the highly promising Android platform in the next quarter of 2010. Doing this ensures that our consumers can keep up with the pace of advanced and sophisticated Android based devices that are currently the toast of the American and European markets. The launch of such devices will ensure that we can empower consumers with the availability of devices that offer the Best Cost to Performance ratio in the smartphone segment. We are also focused on aggressively marketing our devices to enhance consumer awareness with channel and dealer meets. Our five city dealer meets provided the perfect communication channel for ASUS to educate Dealers and Channel Partners about the unique product features for Garmin-Asus smart phones as well as for informing them about the special schemes for Dealers. With all these activities, we plan to capture about 20% of the smartphone market in India.”
At the recent multi city dealer meets, the general feedback from the dealers was that the M10 is a wonderful product and plans of releasing more such high quality smart phones in the Indian market were met with applause and much excitement. Major investment has been bookmarked for marketing, servicing and for highlighting the niche category occupied by Garmin-Asus smartphones and ensure that more and more consumers are able to take advantage of the highly successful GPS capabilities of Garmin-Asus phones. Efforts are on to ensure that newer versions of existing smartphones with more competitive specifications are launched in the shortest period of time and also to launch one new smartphone device every quarter.